Yang Jinhui said he lives with fear everyday inside the cracked walls of his neighbor's house while he awaits government help rebuilding his house, which collapsed a year ago due to subsidence.

"Nearly all the houses in our village have cracks," said Yang, a farmer from a village severely affected by subsidence in Lingshi County of Shanxi Province.

Nearly one million people across the province have been affected by subsidence, the drying-up of underground water and other ecological disasters over the past couple of decades, mainly due to mining. Shanxi is the biggest producer of coal in China.

As coal mine owners gobble up profits, the price of excessive mining is dear.

Over half of the original 530 residents in Taoniu Village, where Yang lives, have moved from land on which they can no longer grow a sufficient amount of crops.

"All the fruit trees have died and farm produce has been dramatically reduced due to water shortages," said Yang. "Our drinking water has to be piped from a village 10 kilometers away as the wells in our village dried up seven years ago."

The underground water resources in the area have almost run out as a consequence of heavy mining.

"The area of sinking land is increasing by 94 square kilometers a year in Shanxi," said Wang Hongying, head of the energy economics institute of the Shanxi Academy of Social Sciences.

The province reported that 2,940 square kilometers of land was subsiding in 2004.

Experts attribute the increase of subsidence to the province's booming mining industry, which now produces more than 500 million tons of coal a year, a quarter of the country's total.

The province will invest 6.8 billion yuan (US$870 million) over three years to treat the problem in nine key areas. The plan aims to solve housing problems by 2008 for subsidence-affected residents, including repairing slightly damaged buildings and building new homes.